politics
- wheresyoured.at You Are Not The Man In The Arena
On a 1910 trip to Paris, Theodore Roosevelt delivered his famous speech about “The Man In The Arena,” which has since been widely adopted by a very specific kind of Silicon Valley cretin. It’s quite a long speech, but here’s the part that they love to share:
“conveyor belt of mediocre men who have convinced themselves they’re gods.”
- www.ineteconomics.org The Mythology of Horizontal Merger Efficiencies
Economists had to distort economic theory to fashion their merger “efficiency” arguments
I'm joking, but the proxy state of Ukraine are doing full neoliberalism like their new owners in the US/EU, so give it some time and I'm sure they will start extracting that sweet, sweet, sweet blood soon enough. "ACTUALLY Putin is the real imperialist for stopping
blood theftvoluntary exchange between individuals, we must join forces with nazis to smash the state!!! Putin's critique of the global labor aristocracy isn't TRUE MARXISM">As one of the few countries in the world that allows donor remuneration, the United States provides between 65 and 80 percent of the world’s source plasma, functioning as what medical journalist Douglas Starr calls “the OPEC of plasma”. In 2016, the United States exported $19 billion worth of plasma, a value comparable to what we export in medium sized cars and clothing. By another measure, plasma is worth more by unit than oil
Tell me again how the book Settlers is wrong in casting the class of Liz Warren wendigos as demonic nazism that only exists as a "parasitic genocidal entity"?
>"Thinking of plasma donation as work might feel uncomfortable for some" https://jacobin.com/2023/08/blood-money-book-review-plasma-donation-exploitation-labor
comfy PMC at Jacobin really did say 'blood work is work' lmao woke neoliberals are beyond parody, I could never be so cynical to write this joke
>"We should not assume that US government officials know what is best for poor Mexicans better than the latter themselves do. Such paternalism is especially worthy of condemnation...the argument that paid plasma donation qualifies as "labor for hire" strikes me as highly dubious. It is far more akin to the sale of a commodity." https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/25/biden-administration-imposes-cruel-border-restriction-barring-mexicans-from-crossing-to-the-us-to-sell-blood-plasma/
the "google Bookchin" anti-communist PMC at Reason demonstrating woke anarcho-neoliberal ideology, glorifying the individual as a free market enterprising agent who transforms themselves into a commodity. I can't wait til blood workers start making LinkedIn blood pages branding themselves: "genuine 100% artisanal Oaxaca plasma" :matt:
This Reaganite hegemonic project of deregulation in favor of "free markets for individual consumers" is a cornerstone of woke Liz Warren adjacent radlibs since OWS. Whether its empowering
Ukrainian teenssex workers in rationally navigating the global marketplace to make choices as an individual to visitEpstein's islanddecolonized pagan temples, or gettingalienated workersexcess free-time having consumers addicted to the 'small consumer joys' of Big Tobacco/opiate corpos, or if its crossing the border to sell blood to labor aristocrats. "Harm reduction" is a cute meme for neoliberal demons to pretend they are progressives fighting "oppression" (a woke radlib term, Marxists are proud to oppress bourgeois vampires lol) and not amoral cheerleaders celebrating new forms of exploitation and rape previously thought impossible- truthout.org Did Defunding Police Cause Oakland’s “Crime Wave”? Here’s What Really Happened.
Media and politicians call the defund police movement a failure, but it hasn’t been tried.
> When “defund police” became a national cry in 2020, police organizations mobilized to beat it back by laying every uptick in crime or high-profile violent incident at the feet of Black Lives Matter and any public official in support of the movement. This national reckoning happened to come at a crucial juncture in Oakland’s budget cycle, and the city council surprised activists by voting, in June 2020, to create a task force to Reimagine Public Safety with a goal “to reduce OPD budget by 50 percent by investing in crime prevention and community.”
>One year later, then-police chief LeRonne Armstrong, the department’s 10th chief in 10 years, linked “out-of-control” crime in the city to the first actual budget cut, which had been approved by the council only days before. [emph. mine] Shortly thereafter, then-Mayor Libby Schaaf made international headlines for “reversing course,” saying “defund the police went ‘too far,’” though no cuts had yet been implemented and Schaaf had always publicly opposed them.
>In October 2022, ABC News investigated claims that defunding has contributed to increasing crime numbers and found that in the vast majority of cities, police funding has increased since 2020. Oakland followed this national trend, with an 18 percent increase between 2019 and 2022.
- www.cpusa.org Black August and the struggle for equality
What is Black August? At first, it was declared by Black political prisoners at San Quentin in 1979 as an annual commemoration to honor the lives of Jonathan and George Jackson, both murdered by the police during the month of August.
Check it out.
- www.commondreams.org President Biden: Don't Give Wall Street Control of Our Public Water Systems
New advisory report pushes disastrous privatization schemes.
- scheerpost.com Samidoun Network: We Dare to Speak Out for Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees
Samidoun is an organization supporting imprisoned Palestinians, that is located in the Rotterdammer neighbourhood of the Centrum, Rotterdam Rechter Maasoever. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Donald…
- working-mass.com Reflections on 2023 DSA and YDSA Convention
Working Mass presents 10 statements reflecting on this year’s DSA and YDSA conventions collected from a selection of attendees across most chapters in Massachusetts and the range of tendencies repr…
- socialistrevolution.org Trump’s Mugshot: More Turmoil and Instability on the Horizon - Socialist Revolution
Donald Trump has made history once again. This time with his mugshot, the first of any former US President. While the liberals crow over this ignominy, the Donald has monetized it as he campaigns undeterred […]
- socialist.net As Ukraine’s offensive stalls, are negotiations on the agenda? | Socialist Appeal
The much-hyped Ukrainian counter-offensive is rapidly running out of steam. As demoralisation creeps in, blame and recriminations abound. All the while, workers in Ukraine, Russia, and the West are paying the price for this imperialist carnage.
The US regime of terror has done nothing but wage wars and interfere with global stability and democracy.
#FreeHawaii
- www.pbs.org Conservatives aim to restructure U.S. government and replace it with Trump's vision
The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance.
- mronline.org The changing climate of class struggle | MR Online
Clarke: The social and economic consequences of climate change will play out along deeply entrenched fault lines of inequality
- jacobin.com For the Jacksonville Shooter, Dollar General Was an Easy Target
Dollar General workers have long raised the alarm about their vulnerability to violence due to understaffing and lack of security. They were tragically proven correct in Jacksonville when a white man murdered three black people at a Dollar General.
- mronline.org Alienation under capitalism and the conspiracy pipeline | MR Online
When class analysis is absent from discussions about systemic problems, issues like income inequality, access to resources, and power imbalances are often oversimplified or ignored.
I didn't feel like getting into it but my god.... People are really buying in to the whole Bidenomics bullshit
- vid.puffyan.us What Is Neoliberalism?
What is neoliberalism answered. The distilled fundamentals of neoliberalism and how such an ideology manifests itself in policy. Support me on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halimalrah Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/halimalrah
no need to write an essay or anything
some libs and baby leftists are kinda baffled by the trump banter here and don't know what's serious and what's irony
- scheerpost.com The New York Times Tries to Lie About Ukraine Without Lying
By David Swanson / World BEYOND War I’m pretty sure I usually read the New York Times differently from how some people read it. I read it looking for two things: the insinuations and the …
- www.theguardian.com Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop ‘very dangerous’ Trump
Leftwing senator advises ‘unification of progressive people in general’ because threat from Republican ex-president is too great
- www.atlanticcouncil.org Jessica Ashooh
Dr. Jessica Ashooh is a former nonresident senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. She is based in San Francisco, where she is
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2858438
> cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/56333 > > > r/ChapoTrapHouse was quarantined in August 2019 and finally banned on 30th June 2020 as part of a ban wave resulting from an update to reddit's content policy. Although over 2000 subs were banned in that wave r/ChapoTrapHouse was by far the most active, accounting for the majority of subscribers and users. > > > > So, who decides Reddit's content policy? The answer seems to be the whole board, but drafting and enforcing it falls under the portfolio of Reddit's Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh, who as you may or may not be aware, is a CIA plant. > > > > This isn't some grand conspiracy theory or anything, it's not even particularly well hidden. A glance at the employment history listed on her linkedin page is enough to create suspicion and a few public domain FOIA internal CIA documents about her places of employment should prove it beyond reasonable doubt. > > > > When she was appointed to her position at Reddit, Jessica Ashooh never worked at a social media company before, had never held a senior position in a private sector company, and had spent the last 7 years working public sector jobs. > > > > Her immediate past position, from March 2015 - May 2017, was as Deputy Director Middle East Strategy Task Force at the Atlantic Council and before that from June 2011 to February 2015 she was a Senior Analyst at the Policy Planning Department of the > > UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs > > > > As this internal CIA document made publically available by FOIA shows, The Atlantic Council, is a CIA front. > > > > As for how intimately involved she was with reddit's anti-evil program that got r/ChapoTrapHouse banned, well, here's a 2018 interview where she talks about it in her own words and goes through a day in the life. > > > > >Still, it made the team’s intentions clearer. Jessica Ashooh, Reddit’s head of policy, spent four years as a policy consultant in Abu Dhabi. “I know what it’s like to live under censorship,” she said. “My internal check, when I’m arguing for a restrictive policy on the site, is Do I sound like an Arab government? If so, maybe I should scale it back.” On the other hand, she said, “people hide behind the notion that there’s a bright line between ideology and action, but some ideologies are inherently more violent than others.” > > > > > >In October, on the morning the new policy was rolled out, Ashooh sat at a long conference table with a dozen other employees. Before each of them was a laptop, a mug of coffee, and a few hours’ worth of snacks. “Welcome to the Policy Update War Room,” she said. “And, yes, I’m aware of the irony of calling it a war room when the point is to make Reddit less violent, but it’s too late to change the name.” The job of policing Reddit’s most pernicious content falls primarily to three groups of employees—the community team, the trust-and-safety team, and the anti-evil team—which are sometimes described, respectively, as good cop, bad cop, and RoboCop. Community stays in touch with a cross-section of redditors, asking them for feedback and encouraging them to be on their best behavior. When this fails and redditors break the rules, trust and safety punishes them. Anti-evil, a team of back-end engineers, makes software that flags dodgy-looking content and sends that content to humans, who decide what to do about it. > > > > > >Ashooh went over the plan for the day. All at once, they would replace the old policy with the new policy, post an announcement explaining the new policy, warn a batch of subreddits that they were probably in violation of the new policy, and ban another batch of subreddits that were flagrantly, irredeemably in violation. I glanced at a spreadsheet with a list of the hundred and nine subreddits that were about to be banned (r/KKK, r/KillAllJews, r/KilltheJews, r/KilltheJoos), followed by the name of the employee who would carry out each deletion, and, if applicable, the reason for the ban (“mostly just swastikas?”). “Today we’re focussing on a lot of Nazi stuff and bestiality stuff,” Ashooh said. “Context matters, of course, and you shouldn’t get in trouble for posting a swastika if it’s a historical photo from the 1936 Olympics, or if you’re using it as a Hindu symbol. But, even so, there’s a lot that’s clear-cut.” I asked whether the same logic—that the Nazi flag was an inherently violent symbol—would apply to the Confederate flag, or the Soviet flag, or the flag under which King Richard fought the Crusades. “We can have those conversations in the future,” Ashooh said. “But we have to start somewhere.” > > > > > >At 10 a.m., the trust-and-safety team posted the announcement and began the purge. “Thank you for letting me do DylannRoofInnocent,” one employee said. “That was one of the ones I really wanted.” > > > > > >“What is ReallyWackyTicTacs?” another employee asked, looking down the list. > > > > > >“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Ashooh said. “That was the most unpleasant shit I’ve ever seen, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking into Syrian war crimes.” > > > > > >Some of the comments on the announcement were cynical. “They don’t actually want to change anything,” one redditor wrote, arguing that the bans were meant to appease advertisers. “It was, in fact, never about free speech, it was about money.” One trust-and-safety manager, a young woman wearing a leather jacket and a ship captain’s cap, was in charge of monitoring the comments and responding to the most relevant ones. “Everyone seems to be taking it pretty well so far,” she said. “There’s one guy, freespeechwarrior, who seems very pissed, but I guess that makes sense, given his username.” > > >“Are we gonna have to scrape the Daddy decal off the minivan?” > > > > > >“People are making lists of all the Nazi subs getting banned, but nobody has noticed that we’re banning bestiality ones at the same time,” Ashooh said. > > > > > >“No one wants to admit it,” an employee said. “ ‘Guys, I was just browsing r/HorseCock and I couldn’t help but notice . . .’ ” > > > > > >The woman in the captain’s cap said, “O.K., someone just asked, ‘How will the exact phrase “kill yourself” be handled?’ ” > > > > > >“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said. “They’re going to get tired of hearing that, but it’s true.” > > > > > >“Uh-oh, looks like we missed a bestiality sub,” the woman in the captain’s cap said. >“Apparently, SexWithDogs was on our list, but DogSex was not.” > > > > > >“Did you go to DogSex?” Ashooh said. > > > > > >“Yep.” > > > > > >“And what’s on it?” > > > > > >“I mean . . .” > > > > > >“Are there people having sex with dogs?” > > > > > >“Oh, yes, very much.” > > > > > >“Yeah, ban it.” > > > > > >“I’m going to get more cheese sticks,” the woman in the captain’s cap said, standing up. “How many cheese sticks is too many in one day? At what point am I encouraging or glorifying violence against my own body?” > > > > > >“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said. > > > > So there you have it, Ashooh is almost certainly a CIA plant and as Director of Policy was almost certainly the one who both wrote the policy that got r/ChapoTrapHouse banned and made the final decision to bring down the hammer. > > > > r/ChapoTrapHouse got banned by the CIA. > > > > So congratulations to all of you beautiful people. > > > > We posted hard and effectively enough that the feds engaged in a multi-year op to shut us down. Never let it be said that posting isn't praxis, or that communist ideas are inherently unpopular or unpalatable to the people living in the imperial core. > > > > r/ChapoTrapHouse dies with the highest honours a leftist publication in the West can receive, it got so effective the glowy bois had to take action to shut it down. And we lived on to start it again in a way that can't be shut down so easily. > > > > Being a subreddit gave r/ChapoTrapHouse the unique ability to reach reddit's userbase but the brand recognition's still there, and there's nothing stopping us reposting watermarked chapo.chat content to subs which aren't banned. > > > > So stay safe, semper post, keep spreading the word about chapo.chat and remember that our primary purpose is as part of a pipeline. Help make Chapo.chat a fun and welcoming place so that the libs who stumble here bother to stay and be educated by osmosis. > > > > With effort and a little luck we can rebuild this website into the subreddit the feds felt the need to shut down having removed their ability to do so.
- jacobin.com Plasma Donors Are Being Exploited in America
The United States is one of five countries where it’s legal to sell your plasma, and roughly 20 million people here do it every year. “Donating” plasma is low-paid labor that has become essential to an exploitative global medical industry.
Adding this to my list of bourgeois "harm reduction" which woke anarcho-neoliberals cheer: "we need free markets for drugs, sex work is work, blood work is work, Biden is a racist who is cruelly removing the agency of Mexicans, we need to smash the Stalinist authoritarian state for ruining our free markets for
workersconsumers!">McLaughlin was in Michigan’s rust belt, speculating on the absence of the American auto industry and the seeming abundance of plasma centers that had sprung up in its place.
capitalism going mask off as satanic vampire ideology
>no surprise that the United States is the largest exporter of human plasma, supplying two-thirds of the world’s supply. In fact, according to Blood Money, blood products accounted for nearly 3 percent of US global exports overall in 2021.
Horror Vanguard podcast is redpilled (blood pilled) about finance imperialism
>Questions like, “If my insurance is paying $12,000 per dosage for this medicine, how much are the people supplying plasma getting?” Payment for plasma donation, given on prepaid debit cards, varies from clinic to clinic but averages out to around $40 per visit.
> One donor tells McLaughlin that about 5 percent of his earnings go toward the special diet regular plasma donation requires, and notes that if clinics provided light snacks, a little would go a long way. At least at a blood drive, you get free cookies.
"special diet" BLOOD COW, BLOOD COW
>In June 2021, US Customs and Border Protection issued a statement saying that, effective immediately, donating plasma was considered “labor for hire,” meaning that the thousands of Mexican plasma donors who crossed into the United States temporarily on a visitor visa would now need a work visa. (The news that plasma donation was considered labor did not extend to the hundreds of other plasma centers around the country.)
>The following year, the two largest plasma corporations — Spain-based Grifols and Australia-based CSL — teamed up to get the faucet spurting again, challenging the work visa requirement with a lawsuit....Out of more than one thousand US clinics, the fifty-two along the border provided up to 10 percent of the total US plasma supply...That’s right — international companies sued in 2021 for their right to continue to collect the blood plasma of Mexican nationals at the border, who were contributing an outsize amount of plasma to the US national pool. This is just one of the stories from Blood Money that, in other contexts, might sound like an unhinged conspiracy theory. (I won’t get into the internationally exported, HIV-positive plasma harvested from Arkansas prisoners that the Clinton administration doesn’t want you to know about.)
"unhinged conspiracy theory" umm ACTUALLY there's no such thing as anarcho-neoliberalism, my Bookchin zine about free markets for individual consumers to sell blood is totally different than the writings of the Federalist Society settler ghoul Liz Warren! When I say "smash the Stalinist state" it's because I'm LITERALLY A COMMUNIST.
>Based on those numbers alone, it’s clear that the work visa requirement hurt these companies’ bottom lines. But the argument that helped sway a federal district judge to help overturn the decision? The human, altruistic side of plasma giving. Per Pro Publica, the judge said that “her decision to grant a preliminary injunction reflected the crucial need for blood plasma in manufacturing lifesaving medications.”
>donors should be compensated fairly — not just for their time, but for providing a priceless commodity mined from their bodies (the long-term effects of which deserve more research).
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we don't need more research to know blood is necessary for human health wtf are you stupid??
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these woke Jacobin radlibs literally share the same unholy neoliberalism of their Bookchin PMC class allies at Reason.com: >"It is far more akin to the sale of a commodity. If a Mexican on a B1/B2 visa sells a used car or a basket of fruit while in the United States, that surely doesn't qualify as "labor for hire." The same reasoning applies to selling blood plasma. The fact that the latter comes from the body doesn't strike me as a decisive difference. After all, selling a car or a fruit basket also involves using your body, in most cases (even if only to hand over the item sold to the buyer). https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/25/biden-administration-imposes-cruel-border-restriction-barring-mexicans-from-crossing-to-the-us-to-sell-blood-plasma/
>With a standard, just wage, donors wouldn’t have to gamify their trips to the clinic or sign up for promos and coupons like they’re going to a car wash.
"we need to move to Mastodon so we aren't controlled by the algorithm" Liz Warren voters only have one type of politics, enshrining free markets for "consumer protection", that's it.
>If plasma donation was considered work today, McLaughlin notes, its union membership would number in the millions
"Blood work is work!" :dsa:
>A union could set a fair minimum payment for plasma and establish sustainable donation periods rather than rushing people in every two weeks, allowing people’s bodies time to recover from losing essential protein
>But is it more uncomfortable than witnessing GoFundMes for insulin, fourteen-year-olds working factory night shifts, public schools in debt to private banks, and other current economic realities?
"I'm not a demonic monster because other monsters exist" STAY WOKE ABOUT LEFT-WING NEOLIBERALS !warren-snake-green
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- www.commondreams.org The Hollow Men (and Woman)
What to say on the surreal spectacle of the eight tawdry GOP cranks, morons, misanthropes and "political pygmies," minus their dark overlord, who gathered this week to spew hate, lies and ugly talking points - migrants! teachers! Soros! Hunter! abortion up to birth! Trans Marxists in bathrooms! - a...
- jacobin.com What Orbán Knows and His Enemies Don’t
Hungary’s right-wing strongman owes his success to his diagnosis of the country’s ailments: economic liberalization has failed many of its citizens.
Article from 2018, but unfortunately still relevant today.
Link: https://nitter.salastil.com/Sprinter99800/status/1695484634467819782#m
- www.click2houston.com Memorial area bookstore files lawsuit against Texas ‘book ban’ law, calling it unconstitutional
A local bookstore is sounding the alarm on a Texas book rating law that it calls unconstitutional.
>It would force bookstores to read and rate every book they sell to schools, including the countless books they sold in the past. Vendors that don’t comply will be barred from doing business with any school.
- theconversation.com Lucy Letby: child murder case highlights need to regulate managers and improve whistleblowing procedures
Regulating NHS managers would ensure they’re held to account for their decisions and actions.
- whtc.com Ottawa Co. Health Department Submits Trimmed ’24 Budget; Threatens Closure if Implemented
OLIVE TWP., MI (WHTC-AM/FM, Aug. 25, 2023) - The conflict between the Ottawa County Department of Public Healt...
!frothingfash took over county government on an anti LGBTQ war against masks platform, purged DEI programs, installed a failed stooge as county administrator, and is attempting to defund the county health dept.
What could go wrong?
- revosocialistmedia.wordpress.com Putin might just have murdered Prigozhin
Vladimir Putin, the imperialist invader of Ukraine and Russian tyrant, might just have murdered the leaders of the Wagner Private Military Company. Yevgeny Prigozhin was Putin’s cook and a po…
- thehill.com GOP talk of military action in Mexico sparks dire warnings
Rising GOP support for the U.S. taking unilateral military action in Mexico against drug cartels is increasingly rattling people on both sides of the border who worry talk of an attack is getting n…
>Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), a global crisis negotiator who served as U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. under Clinton, warned that military action in Mexico would both backfire and fail to solve the underlying issues.
>“It shows the nativist shift of the Republican Party from internationalism to irresponsible diplomacy. It would be a disaster if there were any military action against Mexico — a foreign policy disaster for the United States,” he said.
- www.theguardian.com ‘He’s an insider’: Ramaswamy’s deep ties to rightwing kingpins revealed
Republican candidate brands himself as an ‘outsider’ but has close links to prominent figures Leonard Leo and Peter Thiel
https://archive.vn/il0bR
- electronicintifada.net Masafer Yatta's time bombs -- ticking and latent
Villagers face expulsion, constant harassment and unexploded ordnance as they try to outlast the occupation.